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Andrew Urdiales, 53, looks back into the courtroom gallery as opening statements begin for the former Camp Pendleton Marine in Santa Ana on Wednesday, Mar 21, 2018. He is on trial for allegedly killing five women in Orange, San Diego and Riverside counties between 1986 and 1995. If convicted, he faces the death penalty. His attorney, Associate Defender Ken Morrison is right. (Photo by Mindy Schauer, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Deputy District Attorney Eric Scarbrough makes opening statements in the death penalty case against 53-year-old former Marine, Andrew Urdiales in Santa Ana on Wednesday, Mar 21, 2018. Urdiales is accused of killing five women in Orange, San Diego and Riverside counties between 1986 and 1995.(Photo by Mindy Schauer, Orange County Register/SCNG)

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Opening statements begin in the death penalty case against Andrew Urdiales, 53, in Santa Ana on Wednesday, Mar 21, 2018. A pictures of him as a Marine is shown to the court by his attorney, Associate Defender Ken Morrison. Urdiales is accused of killing five women in Orange, San Diego and Riverside counties between 1986 and 1995.(Photo by Mindy Schauer, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Andrew Urdiales, 53, left, with his attorney, Associate Defender Ken Morrison, during opening statements on Wednesday, Mar 21, 2018. The former Camp Pendleton Marine is on trial for allegedly killing five women in Orange, San Diego and Riverside counties between 1986 and 1995. If convicted, he faces the death penalty. (Photo by Mindy Schauer, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Associate Defender Ken Morrison, left, chats with his client, Andrew Urdiales, 53, during opening statements on Wednesday, Mar 21, 2018. The former Camp Pendleton Marine is on trial for allegedly killing five women in Orange, San Diego and Riverside counties between 1986 and 1995. If convicted, he faces the death penalty. (Photo by Mindy Schauer, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Opening statements begin in the death penalty case against Andrew Urdiales, 53, a former Marine, in Santa Ana on Wednesday, Mar 21, 2018. Pictures of him as a little boy are presented to the court as his attorney talks about his “traumatic” childhood. Urdiales is accused of killing five women in Orange, San Diego and Riverside counties between 1986 and 1995.(Photo by Mindy Schauer, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Andrew Urdiales, 53, looks back into the courtroom gallery as opening statements begin for the former Camp Pendleton Marine in Santa Ana on Wednesday, Mar 21, 2018. (Photo by Mindy Schauer, Orange County Register/SCNG)

As Orange County detectives listened to an ex-Marine’s confession to killing eight women, they struggled to understand why he chose to attack a Saddleback College student whose death marked the beginning of a decade of slayings.

“I guess it could have been anybody,” replied Andrew Urdiales, who explained he had just seen the student walking back to her car.

Two decades after that confession, the convicted Illinois triple murderer now faces trial, which got underway Wednesday, for five killings in Orange, Riverside and San Diego counties. If he is once again convicted, the now-53-year-old serial killer faces the death penalty.

Urdiales shortly after his 1997 arrest confessed to killing one woman in Orange County while stationed as a Marine at Camp Pendleton, four women in Riverside and San Diego counties while stationed at Twenty-Nine Palms and three women in Chicago after leaving the military.

Opening statements in Urdiales’ Orange County murder trial began with Deputy District Attorney Eric Scarbrough describing for a jury the 1986 killing of Robbin Brandley, whose body was left in a secluded Saddleback College parking lot after the aspiring broadcaster was stabbed 41 times.

Brandley had been working that night as an usher at a piano concert at the campus. Friends had dropped her off near her car, and were on their way back to check on her when a security guard came across her bloody body. Investigators ruled out a robbery or carjacking, since her purse and vehicle were left at the scene, and the case went cold.

Over the next three years, the bodies of several women with ties to prostitution were found in abandoned in secluded parts of Riverside and San Diego counties, each having been shot to death.

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The body of Julie McGhee was found in a desolate, desert area in Riverside County. Months later, Mary Ann Wells was found in an industrial area in San Diego. A year later, Tammie Erwin was found in the desert in Riverside county. Six years later, Denise Maney was found deep in the desert in Riverside, her hands bound behind her back with leather straps.

Meanwhile, by 1996, investigators in Illinois investigating the deaths of three women who had been killed and dumped in rivers or lakes learned that Urdiales had been pulled over in a small Indiana town with a revolver in his car.

Chicago detectives retrieved the gun from Indiana law enforcement, a week before it was set to be destroyed, and matched it to bullets found in the bodies of the three women killed in Illinois. Confronted with that information, Urdiales told the Chicago detectives that they may also want to talk to him about some people in California, Scarbrough told the jury.

In the subsequent interview with Orange County detectives, Urdiales recalled being drawn by the Saddleback college sign off the I-5 Freeway, parking at a mini-mall below the college and climbing up a hill in the dark, armed with a “hunting knife.” He described stabbing Brandley over and over, the prosecutor said, and recalled how he stared into her face as he killed her.

“At that moment, when I’m stabbing her, there is nothing else in the world,” Scarbrough quoted Urdiales as telling the investigators. “It is just me and her.”

While prosecutors in California charged him in 1997, they had to wait until the trials in Illinois were completed before they could extradite him. He was transferred to California in 2011.

Urdiales’ attorneys told jurors Wednesday that his actions were rash, rather than cold and calculated. Associate Defender Ken Morrison in his opening statements concentrated largely on what the defense attorney described as his client’s difficult upbringing.

Urdiales was born with brain damage from Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, a result of his mother drinking during her pregnancy, as well as Tourettes Syndrome, Morrison said. His childhood in Chicago was marked by emotional, physical and psychological abuse, the defense attorney said, while his teen years in Burnham, Illinois saw him targeted for relentless harassment and attacks by his peers.

While Urdiales gave detailed confessions to police, Morrison noted that he seemed to dissociate himself when it came time for the actual killings, describing them in passive terms and at times saying his mind had gone blank.

“He never feels any sense of joy, satisfaction, no sense of thrill or any happiness,” Morrison said of the feelings Urdiales described after the killings. “He describes feeling nothing at all. Things become quiet, peaceful, a sense of calm.”

The first phase of Urdiales’ trial will focus on whether he is guilty of the five murders, as well as sentencing enhancements for lying in wait and for the previous murder convictions. If he is convicted of the five killings, a second phase of the trial would determine whether he gets the death penalty or life in prison without the possibility of parole.

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